Posted by finelinebob on August 18, 2006, at 19:44:02
In reply to Forget to include message, posted by Poet on August 18, 2006, at 9:03:17
"Forgot to include message"? YOU'RE A NATURAL!!!
> So I don't have to be ashamed for thinking my career is failure? I'm not in the scientific field, but I suppose the same philosophy could apply elsewhere. Interesting.
Some of the greatest failures in history have been philosophers because when they fail, the can fail BIG and it can take hundreds if not THOUSANDS of years for civilization to recover.
Take Aristotle. It took about 1400 years before Galileo came along and got rid of Ari's notion that bodies in motion naturally came to rest. Newton took advantage of that, but even today studies of "naive science" -- what people believe without or inspite of any particular study or instruction -- shows that Aristotle's ideas naturally come to rest in people's heads.
Now, if you want to point at a really harmful, malicious failure -- particularly for us Babble-onians -- point all your fingers at Rene Descartes. He gets the dubious credit of popularizing mind/body dualism in Western thought to the extent that our "scientific" methodologies still largely reject the notion of one's "mind" being integral to one's "body".Next time someone tells you "it's all in your mind" tell them "it's not MY fault, it's Descartes' fault!" or, if you prefer a more disdainful response, "It's not MY fault you're a slave to a belief system that sees the term 'independent thought' as a truism and not an oxymoron!"
How do you think scientists learned to become professional failures? Karl Popper, philosopher and champion of empiricism based on falsification. Before Popper, scientists were all trying to prove themselves right. After Popper, scientists really really started trying to prove everyone else was wrong while they took some shots at their own views as well. As a result, science has blossomed due to its pursuit of failure!Now, the really kewl thing about Popper and falsification is that if you base your argument on statistics and probability (most of the hard and soft sciences do, to some extent or another) you can NEVER rule out the chance that your demonstration that something was wrong was, in fact, an error! Popper failed at being able to fully describe when you knew you were a failure and were right versus when you knew you were a failure and were wrong.
So, if you're still with me (or if you're just skipping to the bottom of the post to see if anything interesting has happened):1) We have no idea of knowing whether anything we know is right or wrong, and
2) You can blame Descartes for just about anything if you grew up in a Western Culture anytime in the last 200 or so years, particularly if you are talking about being accused of "making it all up" when it comes to whatever disorder you have.
Scientists are still stuck in empiricism, so when it comes to failure they can take it to heart, but usually restrict it to their sensory organs and their brain neurochemistry (where they think their "mind" is .... or isn't).
But Poet! A Philosopher?! You can take failure to infinity, and beyond! You can truly become one of the greatest failures of all time and be proud of it. I mean, Darwin Award winners wind up the butt of internet jokes for a few years, but philosophers get their busts carved in marble for all ages.
((((((((((sigh!))))))))))
... oops. My bad. You didn't say you WERE a philosopher. Well, as you can see, I highly recommend the field and just about any other academic discipline has its own branch of philosophy ... you know, like literary theory and stuff like that.
poster:finelinebob
thread:676622
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/esteem/20060725/msgs/677913.html